RYAN
Later, when the yard had mostly emptied and Theo had gone first, then Danny and Kasperi, then Paige, I sat on Cole’s back steps with Maren beside me and the desert evening around us. Cole had disappeared inside somewhere—his own house, his own rules—and for the moment it was just us.
Eli was the last to go. He’d stood at the gate with Iris asleep on his shoulder, the flamingo float tucked under his other arm, and I’d walked them out and stood at Cole’s front door and watched Eli’s car disappear down the street and thought about what Eli had said on the pool steps an hour ago.
Haven’t found the right person yet. Still putting the words together, still working on it.
Someone would find Eli eventually. Or Eli would find someone. It didn’t happen on your timeline.
I went back to Maren on the steps.
The Phoenix sunset was doing its thing. The colors that still stopped me after a full season, the orange and pink and bruised purple that spread across the whole enormous sky.
Unreasonably beautiful, the way Phoenix sunsets always were.
I understood now why the city kept trying.
Why it had absorbed the loss of one team and shown up for another, filling the arena, buying the jerseys, learning the names.
Phoenix was a city that believed in second chances because it had needed them so many times, and tonight I thought that was not a weakness but an act of faith.
The Sidewinders had gone to the second round in their inaugural season.
They’d lost to a team that had been built over a decade, with All-Stars and playoff experience and a depth the Sidewinders simply didn’t have yet.
But they’d gotten there. We’d made believers out of a city that had every reason to be skeptical, and the front office had started talking about the offseason moves that would make next year different.
This team was not a novelty act. This team was something real, and Phoenix knew it, and the league knew it, and I knew it the way I knew things that were going to matter for a long time.
My phone buzzed.
My father. In Swedish, as always, when Erik had something real to say.
I read it in the low light of Cole’s backyard, Maren warm at my side, the desert going quiet around us.
Du gjorde n?got av det. Och du hittade n?gon v?rd att gora det med.
You made something of it. And you found someone worth making it with.
I stared at it for a long moment.
Then I turned to Maren. She was watching me with the quiet attention she gave things that mattered, her shoulder against mine, waiting.
“My dad,” I said. I translated it for her, simply, the whole thing.
She was quiet when I finished. Her hand found mine.
“He’s right,” she said. “About both parts.”
I held her hand and stared at the sky and thought about Erik Lindqvist in Minnesota watching playoff hockey on his television, watching his son captain a franchise in the desert, watching something that had started as a second chance become something worth rooting for.
I thought about what I was going to say when I called my father back tomorrow.
I thought about next season and the season after that and the house Maren and I were going to find together somewhere in this city, something with room for two people who had been careful for so long and were done being careful.
I held her hand and sat with my father’s words.
Du gjorde n?got av det.
Erik Lindqvist had driven to games in weather that had no business allowing road travel and said almost nothing specific after any of them. He’d taught me that presence was its own language. Sixty-one years old and he’d put the real thing in a text because that was the register he had for it.
I thought about the season. Not the statistics—-the texture of it.
Griffin walking in last on the first day of training camp.
The fresh paint smell of a facility that barely existed.
The slow accumulation of thirty men learning to trust each other.
Theo going quiet and useful instead of quiet and guarded.
Griffin making thirty saves and accepting congratulations with the flat expression of someone who expected nothing less of himself.
The city filling in around us. The arena louder in March than October, louder still in April. Phoenix deciding, without asking permission, that this team was theirs.
I’d wanted to captain a team my whole career. What I hadn’t understood was that the C wasn’t the thing. The room it put me in charge of was the thing. The room had turned out to be full of people worth it.
“I have a house,” I said.
She turned. “What?”
“In Sweden. Outside Malmo, near my grandfather’s rink.
” I paused. “I’ve never mentioned it because—-I don’t know.
It was private. It’s not big, it’s old, it needs work.
But it’s mine and it’s been there a long time.
” I met her eyes. “I want to take you there this offseason. Show you the rink. Meet Anna properly. Show you where I come from.”
She held my gaze. Her expression moved through something I’d learned to read over seven months. The moment she decided something, the settling of it, her voice dropping half a register and staying there.
“Yeah,” she said. “I want that.”
I pulled her closer.
The woman beside me who had walked into my life in September and stayed there.
I pressed my lips to her hair.
“Second chances,” I said.
She looked up at me. “What?”
“That’s what this is. All of it.” I gestured at the yard, the sky, the city beyond. “Phoenix. The team. Us.” I paused. “I came here not knowing what I’d find. Turns out it was everything I didn’t know I was looking for.”
She held it for a moment. Then she turned her face into my shoulder and I felt her smile against me.
“Alltid din,” she said. Quietly. In Swedish. Getting the pronunciation mostly right.
I went still.
She’d been practicing. I didn’t know when, didn’t know how long she’d been sitting with those two words and teaching herself how to say them, but she had, and she’d just said them to me in the dark, simply, like it was something she’d decided.
I held her tighter than I probably needed to.
“Yeah,” I said, against her hair. My voice came out lower than I’d intended. “Alltid.”
Somewhere between April and tonight she’d taken those two words and learned how to say them—-not just the spelling, the actual sound of them, the vowels that had no equivalent in English. She’d said them quietly, and I’d felt her effort move through my chest.
She’d decided to give me that.
It was just us and the desert and the stars coming out slow above the mountain line.
I was going to spend the rest of my life with her if she’d let me.
I’d gone to Tom in person on a Sunday afternoon, the week after the season ended. Linda was visiting her sister in Tucson. Tom poured two glasses of water and sat down across from me and waited.
I said it. All of it. What she meant to me, what I wanted, what I was asking for.
Tom was quiet for a long moment after. He turned his glass in both hands the way Maren turned her coffee mug when she was thinking something through.
Then he looked at me and said yes. Simply, like it had never been in question. And then, quieter, “I was hoping you’d ask.”
I took Griffin to the jewelry store without explanation. He figured it out in the parking lot, looked at me once, and walked in.
Dark wood cases, individual lighting on each piece, a jeweler who appeared from somewhere and didn’t hover.
Griffin and I moved down the cases slowly.
He had his hands in his pockets. I had one of Maren’s rings in mine—-the thin gold band she kept on her right hand.
You bring a ring you already own so the jeweler can size the new one to match.
I’d lifted it off her dresser three days ago and had been carrying it ever since.
“Is that her ring?” Griffin asked.
“Yeah.”
“She leave that at your place?”
“She leaves a lot of things at my place.” I smirked at him, I mean how could I not? This was great.
Griffin pressed his lips together and turned to look very carefully at a display case that had nothing to do with what we were shopping for. “Okay,” he said. “Moving on.”
I found it in the third case. Six carats, round solitaire, platinum band. I stopped.
Griffin leaned over the case and furrowed his brows. “You can see that from space,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the point. I want her to look down at her hand for the rest of her life and know I was serious about her from the day I met her.”
Which was true. Nine years ago I’d held the line at Jensen’s pond and told myself I’d moved on. I hadn’t moved on. I’d just been waiting without knowing what I was waiting for.
Griffin stared at me. “That’s disgusting,” he said. “I mean that in the best possible way.” A smirk.
“I know.”
He shook his head slowly. “You know most people don’t ask the dad anymore.”
“I know,” I said.
“Very old world of you.”
“She deserves old world.”
Griffin looked at the ring one more time.
Then at me. Then back at the ring. “Yeah,” he said quietly.
“She does.” He straightened up. “But if you actually want her to wear it you need to go more reasonable. She’s got her hands in someone’s shoulder or whatever all day long. That thing is gonna get in the way.”
I looked at the one next to it. Four carats, same cut, same band. Still extraordinary. “That one.”
“Good call,” Griffin said.
The jeweler slid it out of the case. I set Maren’s ring on the counter beside it so he could size the new one to match, and he nodded and took both.
I put my card down without looking at the total.
Griffin glanced at the number on the terminal and said nothing.
He understood. She was worth ten times it and we both knew that.
We walked out into the parking lot and Griffin stopped and turned to me.
“You asked my dad, didn’t you,” he said.
“Of course I did.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he put his hand on the back of my neck the way he had after every big win since we were nineteen years old. “You’re a good man, Lindy,” he said. “I’m glad you’re going to be my brother.”
I didn’t trust myself to say anything. I didn’t need to.
We got in the car and drove back to the facility, and neither of us mentioned it again.
Sweden in six weeks. The rink. Maren in the kitchen garden.
Everything still ahead.
The desert night wrapped around us. The pool had gone still. The stars did their indifferent, permanent thing overhead.
I sat in the warm dark of a Phoenix evening with the woman I loved and thought about Sweden in the offseason, and a house near a diesel-scented rink, and a team that was only just getting started, and all the ordinary extraordinary things that were still ahead.
I closed my eyes.
I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
The End